> Dhimitri: I’d prefer my name not being in the same phrase as newbie. I get this annoying itch in the back of my head when I read this. I you had taken the time to look at my previous posts and look at the team in Napoli you would see that I value secondary stats as much as any in this game!

To continue the current debate I can only say that there are apparently two kinds of managers here: those who likes the player-dimension and those who like the tactical game. My oppinion of the matter is much in line with JakobK. If you can manage to beat a team superior in all aspects, on all positions – that being both primary AND secondary skills – 9 out of 10 games, then it is a bug and not because you are a tactical god. I rest my case.

I could buy the finest foods in the market, but I can’t cook like a chef…..does that mean my food will taste great?

I’m really sorry you’ve got an itch. It was not my intention.
However, there are a few reasons why I put your name and “newbie” in the same phrase. RubySoccer was buid on the same concepts of MS with the intention of improving it beyond (Danilo can correct me on this). While it may be true you have played for over a year, it is also true some others here have played since 1999. On this aspect, it does make you a newbie, but of course doesn’t take anything away from your skills as a manager. It’s just a matter of experience.
You are correct regarding your players, they are quality. However you are incorrect regarding the importance of tactics (that being just my opinion). As Henry told you, after the first game he lost with you 0-4, he changed his tactics. The rest you know. RL is full of examples that the notion “the superior should win 9 out of 10” is far from realistic. The change in tactics was the thing that made the difference and you yourself showed the proof. I guess it’s time to try a new thing with your team :)

Uhm, I need to correct you :). I (Brest) lost 0-4. I changed my tactics and adapted. I told my friends at Lyon and PSG, what I did in order for them to also beat Napoli :). Like I said before. France needed to be put on the map, and it was in all our best intrest to see french teams come as far as possible.
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We now have a 4th CL spot :)…..let’s see how long we can keep it…..

Viva la France :)))

I too is from the MS generation where I played many seasons aswell. As I recall there was more or less the same problem that some tactics simply didn’t work against others. So this isn’t really a new thing. Perhaps it’s just an illustration of how difficult it is to create a working match engine? I don’t know I don’t posses programming skills. As an answer to your post I do not say that the superior team should win 9 out of 10 against the weaker team. What I do say is, that the weaker team shouldn’t be able to beat the stronger team 9 out of 10 because they use a 4-4-2 instead of a 3-5-2. That simply isn’t realistic in my oppinion.
And to you Hank: Even though one doesn’t master the fine art of cooking, buying the best quality of food to work with sure gets you a long way down the road.

You haven’t see me cook then……ha.

Regarding to some previews posts about the match engine like said in the main post. To many games are random, losing is part of the game, but the stats should be fixed to it. Having 30 shots vs 2 and lose 1-0 with an average player rating of 8.5 is just weird. And when it happens once or twice a season ok….that’s normal..also in real life. But losing 10 of those will get people frustrated.
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I’m a big fan of more tactics, i like to experiment with tacs to see what suits my team the best and against what team i’m playing.
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Aslo i would like to make a point about Individual Tactics and the replay. If i chance the Individual Tactics to stay back or move back on attack, on a defender, and i see him running around on like AC0 i think there is a bug in the system. Players shouldn’t be walking there if you have those tactics. As far as i have experienced the Individual Tactics is kinda useless regarding the match outcome,, which should not be. It should have affect with like dribble or control. If you say to a defender move forward when on attack you think he eithers dribbles with the ball, pass it along or shoot it away. When you set the tactics to short passing and rare with a player with 90+ dribble and control he shouldn’t easly lose the ball.
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Hank, you know they invented cooking books a while ago? ;)

Gabriel, any reply to me previous post?
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Regarding to some previews posts about the match engine like said in the main post. To many games are random, losing is part of the game, but the stats should be fixed to it. Having 30 shots vs 2 and lose 1-0 with an average player rating of 8.5 is just weird. And when it happens once or twice a season ok….that’s normal..also in real life. But losing 10 of those will get people frustrated.
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Again and again we get screwed over by CPU teams who have stats of like only 8 shots and score 4x vs 27 shots and 1 goal? My team isn’t the best, but what the BEEP is going on? And i’m not even the one who gets the hardest hits when i look at other matches in France. Though, i can’t say anything about other countries.

I agree that this kind of match shouldn’t be that common, Vaughn. I’m currently working on the match engine, implementing partial tackles (when the player makes the opponent lose the ball but does not control it) and a few other enhancements will follow this one. Let’s see if these weird results are affected by them.
I’ve seen statistics like this when you don’t have any defenders on -1 or 0 mentalities, giving your goalkeeper penalties on his skills to defend shots. But if you say this is common to many teams it may not be the case.
Let’s keep this discussion going in order to improve the match engine ;)

16-computerGrenoble

G Romuald Bloch 9.5
D Gervasio Ortiz De Zárate 8.3
D Diego Viepa 10.0
M Ruben Rui Miguel 8.1
M Napoléon Barraud 5.4
M Cyrille Peyre 5.8
A Joris Guyon 4.7
A Richard Hankey 4.4
A Giovanni Dentice 6.7
A Geoffroy Brunel P 5.7
A Fabricio Balaguer 9.4

No Manager

=======
=======

4 × 1

2-3-5 formation 4-3-3
40% possession 60%
8 shots 24
8 shots on target 20
65% accurrate passes 56%
35% effective tackles 65%
3 corners 6
4 offsides 1
30 fouls 14

=======
=======

Strasbourg16-human

G Isandro Munguia 5.9
D Willi Wulf 8.8
D * Germano Valente 10.0
D Julián Echeverría 10.0
D Mauro Braga 10.0
M João Abreu 10.0
M André Esteves 8.6
M Sandro Couto 10.0
A Andres Arieta 10.0
A Craig Whitington 10.0
A Vinícius Vasconcelos 7.7

Manager: Dhimiter Gjodede

Looking at the match replay, I would say Grenoble got me on the break, every time, so kuddos to them.
Yet I have seven players with a 10 rating, and this is what I cannot make sense of. :)

===Score=(Shots on goal) Strasbourg-Lens==0=1=(22-17)=[Lens plays with 10 players for 89 min]
Strasbourg-PSG==0-0=(17-3)=[PSG with 10 players for 23 min] Grenoble-Strasbourg=4-1=(8-20) Strasbourg-Lyon==0-0=(20-5)
Strasbourg-Chateauroux=0-0=(28-4) Monaco-Bordo=0-0=(20-4) Monaco-Brest=2-0=(18-7)=[Monaco with 10 players for 87 min] PSG-Amiens==0-2=(24-4) Ajaccio-Metz==0-1=(25-8=[Ajaccio with 9 players for 66 min] Rennes-Angers==0-0=(21-3)


First of all I am not complaining!!! :D
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The games above are 10 out of a total 70 played so far in Ligue 1, or 14%.
Now, football is great because there are always surprises. But these surprises are created because the underdog works hard and outplays the favorite.
There are also freak games where a team surrounds the opponent (which has parked the bus in front of its own goal) and yet can’t score or even goes down on a single lucky break for the other side.
While the surprises are somewhat “common” and acceptable, freak results are very rare and far in between.
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All those 10 games above can be counted as freak games for various reasons:
>Endless shots and no goals vs 2-3 shots and a goal
>Whole game played with 10 players, the other team “dominates” the game, but you still stick one in and win it all: Strasbourg-Lens 0-1
>Whole game played with 10 players, but you still cruise through game for win: Monaco-Brest 2-0
>The Ajaccio-Metz is me favorite: Ajaccio dominates the game with only 9 players on the pitch for over 60 mins and still takes a loss. It should have won because of performance, but it lost (logically so) because it was simply outnumbered. The freak factor here is that Ajaccio still managed 25 shots on goal despite being 2 players less.
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SO, changes are needed here to bring the game closer to RL football so to speak.
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1. There should be a probability margin of scoring per number of shots on goal. for example:
10 SHG=80% chance of scoring at least once 15 SHG=90% chance of scoring at least once
20+ SHG===99% chance
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2. Red cards SHOULD change the course of the game in a negative way for the receiving side
1 RC should hurt the game of the receiving side in 90% of the cases (such as decrease the quality on the pitch by 20%)
2+ RC should simply kill the game of receiving side in 99% of the cases
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3. Players with not great shooting skills should still manage to score when they take plenty of shots even if it’s Buffon or Casillas guarding the net. The difference between a great shooter and an average one should be that if they take 10 shots on goal each, the great one can score 3 out of 10 an the average one can score just 1. But both should be able to score by the simple law of probability in proposition #1 above.
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4. whatever comes into your mind :)

The main idea I think we could work on what you’ve written Dhimitri is that as the number of shots on goal raise we could make it increasingly easier to score. I’ll experiment a few changes with this idea after I finish the current match enhancements I’m working on.

Sometimes we score a lot, but I lost to an outsider 0-3 away just because I lost. It hurts and the Board was mad, but, of course, I am not complaining either =) I just want ny players score easier against weaker GKs and defenders, because “goal festivals” are so rare in Brazil Serie A =)

i have a small question regarding the next update on shots on goal…
we can shoot the goal post every time with a long distance shot from the centre half, but does that increase the probability of goals???
gabriel, i think we can narrow down the type of shots that are likely to score goals ( considering all the factors like goalkeepers abilities and goal strikers abilities)

some of the likely cases to be considered are below:

• a shot is more likely to produce a goal in one on once case
• if the ball rebounds off the goalkeeper, even the goalkeeper with highest quality (in terms of keeping, speed and control) should find it difficult to stop a shot by a striker with lower quality.
• if the goalkeeper has been kept very busy then, he should lose his stamina more than normal times, thus reducing his overall speed and other factors that are affected by stamina.
• if a Shot takes a deflection on the way to goal, thus the goalkeeper is helpless.
• Coolness (may be defined by aggressiveness, less aggressive could mean more thoughtful) of the striker in front of the goal??? could chip the ball instead of firing it blindly…
  
  we could have suggestions on the likely cases where even a keeper of highest quality should find things difficult against him.

feels great to be back after a long time:)

Interesting suggestions, Parag, I’ll consider them when implementing changes to the scoring probability.
Regarding your first question (lots of long shots increasing the probability of goals) I was thinking something like making the keeper lose stamina every shot, but the amount lost is related to the difficult to defend the shots, so lots of long shots wouldn’t make him lose that much.

Wow, that’s what I call “effective attack” :

3-5-2 formation 4-4-2
51% possession 49%
6 shots 3
5 shots on target 3
62% accurrate passes 57%
67% effective tackles 62%
0 corners 0
1 offsides 1
40 fouls 42

Score 4×0 vs Parana =)

Hehe, Parana’s manager sits right beside me here at work. He was not happy with the result :D

gabriel, i didn’t mean that regarding my first question… what i meant was “high number of shots should not necessary mean more goals”. we can keep shooting from long distance, but that should not increase the chances of goal too much. (unless he is christiano). i meant more number of realistic shots should increase the chances of goals. as i have listed some of those above. we could have more feedback from other players regarding the realistic shots…

number of shots can be combined with range of shots and shooting skill quality

number of shots x shot distance x shot skill = 0.XXX

Also, a good idea IMO would be to add a separate option for midfielders taking shots (usually long range) such as: Strikers shot from short/medium range and midfielders/defenders take long shots. It should give a tactical advantage/alternative for teams with good shot takers not in the striking department

I agree with Dhimitri that midfielders should shoot from long distance and strikers from medium and short.

we could have a different shooting options for each players ( or one each for strikers, midfielders and defenders) rather than one shooting orders for the whole team.

But i think the best option would be to have different options best on the field position

• Any players on A1 and A0 field position could do with short/medium range shots
• Players on A-1 to M1 could do with Medium/Long range shots
• Players beyond that position could use Long range shots.

And the first and foremost thing, i think we should not set these orders. These should be there by default. But only in case if any manager wants to try something different he should be able to change this. ( i think that is what happens generally)

Even after the match engine had been tweaked the situation is still a bit too random =)

América-RN

G Steve Muddel 6.7
D Luís Damásio 5.6
D Faouzi Allais 9.4
D Felipe Ortiz De Sandoval 10.0
D Dionísio Seixas 7.2
M Danilo Viana 8.9
M Salomón Aragones 9.9
M Gustavo Nóbrega 10.0
M Luca Morrone 9.5
A Rubens Prado 9.7
A Felipe Amaral 9.0

Manager: Alik Bentley
Formation: Default
0 × 1

4-4-2 formation 3-5-2
50% possession 50%
19 shots 8
17 shots on target 5
62% accurrate passes 63%
76% effective tackles 45%
3 corners 1
3 offsides 6
8 fouls 14
Corinthians

G Eugène Simon 9.5
D Miguel Queirós 10.0
D * Xavier Gomes 10.0
D Abejundio Guerra Montejo 9.8
M Michael Pohl 7.4
M Renato Horta 2.6
M Rafael Belmonte 4.0
M Rogério Guerreiro 10.0
M Incendio Peixoto Da Fontoura 6.3
A Breno Frota 6.8
A Salomón Borrallo 9.8

20 min: Borrallo (a) scores
23 min: The referee shows Belmonte (a) a red card.
49 min: The referee shows Pohl (a) a red card.

My team played against 10 since 23rd minute and then against 9 after the the 49th. Still, couldn’t score ! One of the problems is that it is hard to say if red cards have an important effect on the squad’s performance.